Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i

Deer, and Elias Saba contributed invisibly but crucially.

      The Department of Near Eastern Studies and the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University continue to provide me with superb milieux in which to thrive.

      As for my family—Parvine, Maryam, Asiya (and Cotomili)—they are spectacular in indulging my obsessions and provide a constant and welcome reminder of what is truly important.

      Shawkat M. Toorawa

      Introduction

Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Anjab Ibn al-Sāʿī (593–674/1197–1276) was a Baghdadi man of letters and historian. As the librarian of two great law colleges, the Niẓāmiyyah and later the Munstanṣiriyyah, and a protégé of highly placed members of the regime, Ibn al-Sāʿī’ enjoyed privileged access to the ruling circles and official archives of the caliphate⁴ and contributed to the great cultural resurgence that took place under the last rulers of the Abbasid dynasty. This was an age of historians, and most of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s works were histories of one sort or another, but only fragments survive. The only one of his works that has come down to us complete is Consorts of the Caliphs. This too is a history insofar as it follows a rough chronological order, but in other respects it is more like a sub-genre of the biographical dictionary. It consists of brief life sketches, with no narrative interconnection, of concubines and wives of the Abbasid caliphs and, in an appendix, consorts of “viziers and military commanders.” This last section, however, is slightly muddled; it includes some concubines of caliphs and wives of two Saljūq sultans, as well as one woman who was neither;⁵ has a duplicate entry; and is not chronological, all of which suggests that it is a draft.⁶

For the later Abbasid ladies of Consorts of the Caliphs, Ibn al-Sāʿī uses his own sources and insider knowledge, but for the earlier ones, he quotes well-known literary materials, drawing especially on the supreme historian of early Abbasid court literature, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (284–ca. 363/897–ca. 972), author of the Book of Songs (Kitāb al-Aghānī). In this way, two quite different formats are juxtaposed in Consorts of the Caliphs: the later entries follow the obituary format of the chronicles of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s period; the earlier ones are adapted from the classical anecdote format of several centuries before, which combined narrative and verse in dramatic scenes. Many of the entries from both periods are framed by isnāds — the names of the people who originally recorded the anecdotes and of the people who then transmitted them, either by word of mouth or by reading from an authorized text. The names of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s own informants give an indication of what interested scholars and litterateurs in the Baghdad of his day. The meticulousness of the isnāds signals that Consorts of the Caliphs is a work of serious scholarship, as does the fact that Ibn al-Sāʿī’s personal informants are men of considerable standing.⁷

Ibn al-Sāʿī survived the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 656/1258 and lived on unmolested under Ilkhanid rule. Consorts of the Caliphs, which was written shortly before 1258,⁸ survives in a single late-fifteenth-century manuscript.⁹ This one small work is unique in affording multiple perspectives on things that have, over the centuries, been felt to be fundamental and durable in the Arabic literary and cultural imagination: the poetry of the heroines of early Abbasid culture; the mid-Abbasid casting of their careers and love lives into legend; a reimagining of the court life of the Abbasid period, along with the idealization of the court life of their own times, by Ibn al-Sāʿī and his contemporaries; and finally, the perspective of some two hundred years later in which the stories retold by Ibn al-Sāʿī were still valued, but lumped together in a single manuscript with an unrelated and unauthored miscellany of wit, wisdom, poems, and anecdotes.¹⁰

      Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Life and Times: Post- and Pre-Mongol

What is it like to live through a cataclysm? When Ibn al-Sāʿī finished writing his Brief Lives of the Caliphs (Mukhtaṣar akhbār al-khulafā’) in 666/1267–68 (as he notes on the last page),¹¹ it was as a survivor of the Mongol sack of Baghdad ten years earlier, in which the thirty-seventh and last ruling Abbasid caliph, al-Mustaʿṣim, had been killed. With al-Mustaʿṣim’s death came the end of the caliphate, an institution that had lasted more than half a millennium. Although the caliphate had shrunk by the end from an empire to a rump, the Abbasid caliphs, as descendants of the Prophet’s uncle, still claimed to be the lawful rulers of all Muslims. The late Abbasids ruled as well as reigned, asserting their claim to universal leadership by propounding an all-inclusive Sunnism and bonding with the growing groundswell of Sufism.¹² Baghdad remained the intellectual and cultural capital of Arabic speakers everywhere.

After the Mongols arrived, all this changed. Egypt’s Mamluk rulers—Turkic slave soldiers—became the new Sunni standard-bearers, and Baghdad lost its role as the seat of high courtly culture. Ibn al-Sāʿī wrote Brief Lives in full consciousness of the new world order. The work dwells on the zenith of the caliphate centuries before and tells stirring tales of the great, early Abbasids, underlined by poetry. This is legendary history, cultural memory. After noting how the streets of Baghdad ran with blood after the death of al-Mustaʿṣim,¹³ Ibn al-Sāʿī recites an elegiac tally of the genealogy, names, and regnal titles of the whole fateful Abbasid dynasty, of whom every sixth caliph was to be murdered or deposed.¹⁴ The tailpiece of Brief Lives, by contrast, an enumeration of the world’s remaining Muslim rulers, is a prosaic political geography.¹⁵ Baghdad no longer rates a mention on the world stage. Culture is not evoked. The question that hangs unasked is: what was left to connect the past to the present?

Consorts of the Caliphs, Both Free and Slave, to give it its full title, is a kind of anticipated answer to that question. It is an essay in cultural memory written in the reign of al-Mustaʿṣim,¹⁶ but it shows no premonition of danger, even though the Mongols were already on the march. It represents the last two hundred years—the reigns of al-Muqtadī (467–87/1075–94), al-Mustaẓhir (487–512/1094–1118), al-Mustaḍīʾ (566–75/1170–80), al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh (575–622/1180–1225), al-Ẓāhir (622–23/1225–26), al-Mustanṣir (623–40/1226–42), and the beginning of the reign of al-Mustaʿṣim (640–56/1242–58)—as a golden age for the lucky citizens of Baghdad, thanks to the public benefactions of the great ladies of the caliph’s household.¹⁷ It is a miniature collection of vignettes juxtaposed with no reference to the general fabric of events, designed as a twin to Ibn al-Sāʿī’s now lost Lives of Those Gracious and Bounteous Consorts of Caliphs Who Lived to See Their Own Sons Become Caliph (Kitāb Akhbār man adrakat khilāfat waladihā min jihāt al-khulafāʾ dhawāt al-maʿrūf wa-l-ʿaṭāʾ). Using wives and concubines as the connecting thread, it yokes the current regime to the age of the early, legendary Abbasids.

Today most of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s prolific and varied output is lost, although much of it was extant as late as the eleventh/seventeenth century¹⁸ and scattered quotations survive in other authors. Scholars disagree whether Brief Lives is really by Ibn al-Sāʿī, probably because, unlike Consorts of the Caliphs and the Concise Summation of Representative and Outstanding Historical and Biographical Events, the only other surviving work indisputably attributed to him,¹⁹ it has no scholarly apparatus.²⁰ But it is certainly the work of a Baghdadi survivor of the Mongol sack, typical of a period which produced quantities of histories of all kinds (as did Ibn al-Sāʿī himself).²¹ As for Ibn al-Sāʿī, he was sixty-three when Baghdad fell. Outwardly, little changed for him in the eighteen years he still had to live: his career as a librarian continued uninterrupted.²² Perhaps the real cultural rift had occurred before the arrival of the Mongols. The supposedly happy and glorious reign of al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh, “Champion of the Faith,” in which Ibn al-Sāʿī was born, was unprecedentedly totalitarian: according to one contemporary, the caliph’s spies were so efficient and the caliph himself so ruthless that a man hardly dared speak to his own wife in the privacy of his home.²³ Courtly life centered on al-Nāṣir as the teacher of true doctrine and keystone of social cohesion.²⁴ The latter-day ladies of the caliph’s household